Basking in Russia’s Love Long After a Musical Triumph

"You look to the heart of a Russian," Van Cliburn says.Credit
James Hill for The New York Times

MOSCOW

A SMALL tumult erupted on Mayakovsky Square the other day as a crowd of Russians pressed in around a gangly, white-haired man from Texas.

At issue was love. Tremulous, tearful love, the kind of love that could compel you to embroider bedroom slippers and tea cozies and thrust them at your love object as he climbs into his car, along with bunches of daisies and a single, perfectly ripe pear.

That is the way Russians feel about Van Cliburn, the American pianist who in 1958, at the height of the cold war, won the Soviet Union’s premier musical competition. Fifty-three years later, that event still reverberates so powerfully here that when Mr. Cliburn steps into a concert hall, the whole room seems to twitch and move toward him like a living organism.

As they watched the awards ceremony on Thursday night, fanning themselves like Baptists at a megachurch, some talked in low voices about the conductor (Russian) who withdrew from the event in disgrace after calling the prize-winning cellist (Armenian) a word that loosely translates as “redneck.” A gaggle of women in their 70s stood in the lobby fuming about the elimination of a favorite pianist in the second round, finally appointing one of their number to confront a judge who was making his way toward the buffet.

On Saturday, as her friends bickered about whether it would tax Mr. Cliburn too much to give him more flowers, Natalya Subbotina mustered her courage and approached him. He embraced her, and she began to weep. “Natasha!” one of her friends shouted. “Get ahold of yourself! Get ahold of yourself!”

Ms. Subbotina was still shaken a few minutes later, as he drove away.

“He loves the whole world,” she said. “There is enough of him for the whole world! This is a great heart!”

These are echoes of a historic moment. In 1958, Khrushchev was exploring the idea of “peaceful coexistence” with the United States. Enter Mr. Cliburn, a raw-boned 23-year-old from Kilgore, Tex., with spidery fingers that sometimes got so sore he would wrap them in gauze and ointment.

HARVEY LAVAN CLIBURN JR. was the son of an executive in the oil industry. Trained by his mother and then at Juilliard, he was an unabashed Russophile who responded to applause with almost comical modesty.

Soviet radio broadcast his performances, and word spread like an electric current. In the final round, after he played Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto in D Minor, ovation followed ovation. Although there was a rule against taking a second bow, the jury’s chairman, the pianist Emil Gilels, took Mr. Cliburn by the hand and led him back onstage.

Legend says that Mr. Gilels was worried enough to approach Khrushchev about the American. “Is he the best?” Khrushchev is said to have asked, and when Mr. Gilels allowed that he was, Khrushchev said, “In this case, give him first prize.”

The outpouring came then. Mr. Cliburn recalls the Soviet citizens who waited outside his hotel, carrying hand-knitted socks and jars of jam. Russians, journalists wrote at the time, would indiscriminately congratulate anyone who looked American. It was a sign that a thaw had taken hold; what came first, the rush of public emotion or the official approval, was never entirely clear.

“You know, we are very emotional people, very feeling people,” said Rima Lebedeva, 70, a gastroenterologist who spent most of her summer vacation at this year’s competition. “At that time we had no freedom. Everything inside us was strangled. His performance allowed these feelings to be released. From that moment they began to develop.”

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The mania for “Vanya” or “Vanushka,” as he came to be called, cut through all levels of Soviet society. A Russian violinist, Artur Shtilman, recalled the tremulous words of a janitor who said the performance had left her strangely transfixed: “This young man, really just a boy — he plays, and I sit and cry. I myself don’t know what is happening to me, because I have never listened to this music, and I simply cannot tear myself away.”

Mr. Cliburn returned to a hero’s welcome in New York, but the ecstatic fame of his Soviet performance proved impossible to sustain. He played Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky, his Moscow triumphs, through a 20-year concert career and surfaced at virtually every high-level meeting between Soviet and American leaders.

Critics eventually dropped their rapturous tone and began using his name as shorthand for talent that fizzled early. A Seattle Times reviewer called a 2003 comeback performance “both strange and profoundly depressing.”

“There were occasional flashes of the old Cliburn,” she wrote. “But not many.”

NONE of that mattered in Moscow last week. Despite the fact that Mr. Cliburn had no plans to play the piano on this visit, Yevgeniya Zalyashina traveled 120 miles from Tula to be present at all his appearances — which sometimes consisted of just walking into the concert hall. She was joined by a group of women who had met in 1958 while standing in line all night for tickets.

“You have to understand, people were talking about him on the bus, on the Metro,” said Lyudmila Avdushina, 73. “For us he was never a foreigner, he was one of ours.”

For decades, when Mr. Cliburn came to Moscow, his fans resorted to subterfuge to get advance word of his movements — “I had my channels,” one of them said with a twinkle. “I knew journalists.” An American colleague recalled showing up at a rehearsal with Mr. Cliburn on a rainy morning in 1989 and finding 100 delirious fans who had made their way backstage and were barely restrained by the police.

Their numbers are fewer now, and Mr. Cliburn is easier to get to. Last week, he beamed like a child when he saw familiar fans in the crowd, and he spent so long greeting people individually that it was sometimes a challenge to traverse the sidewalk.

People gathered around him, handing him photographs to sign, and for a moment, in the last light of a summer evening, it seemed that Van Cliburn was exactly where he belonged.

He said as much in an interview. “With most of humanity all we see is the shell of a human being,” he said. “But you look to the heart of a Russian.”

A version of this article appears in print on July 2, 2011, on Page A7 of the New York edition with the headline: Basking in Russia’s Love Long After a Musical Triumph. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe